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Apache has disclosed a critical actively exploited path traversal flaw in the popular Apache web server, version 2.4.49. This path traversal means that an attacker can trivially read the contents of any file on the server that the Apache process has access to. This could expose highly sensitive information, even as critical as the server's own private SSL certificates. See the Sonatype blog for more technical information on the vulnerability.

Yesterday the most used social media platforms in the world were inaccessible for 6 hours straight. Later, in a press release, Facebook revealed that the outage was due to configuration changes in their routers. There is no doubt that Facebook has an intense incident response plan, yet a small blind spot resulted in a significant business interruption. So how do we avoid this? The truth is, outages and performance issues are bound to happen in any network.

There are many ways to add search functionality to a Rails application. While many Rails developers choose to use the native search functionality built into popular databases like MySQL and Postgres, others need more flexible or feature rich search functionality. ElasticSearch is probably the most well known option available but it has its own issues. Firstly, it is a resource hungry beast. To run ElasticSearch properly in production, you need a few beefy servers.

Less than 24 hours ago, the world came to a “social standstill” as Facebook, and its sister companies, WhatsApp and Instagram, became unavailable, leaving its 3.5 billion users in a flap. The outage, which lasted almost 6 hours, shut off access for users and businesses all over the world and caused ripple effects that we will likely continue to see in the immediate (and perhaps not-so-immediate) future.

Yesterday the world’s largest social media platform suffered a global outage of all of its services for nearly six hours during which time, Facebook and its subsidiaries, including WhatsApp, Instagram and Oculus, were unavailable.